I honestly cannot believe this is how society wants me to spend my time.

It is a beautiful autumn day; the birds are chirping and the sun is shining over the crystalline water of the river. A cool breeze is blowing through the trees.

So much beauty to be discovered out in the world, yet this is how society wants me to spend my day—locked inside this cement school building, solving 10-part algebra problems that will serve no purpose in my life, that will help me grow in no way. Trapped sitting at my desk, my math worksheet lit by the glow of the computer screen and the lamp, slowly atrophying my muscles, worsening my vision by the second.

What’s the purpose? Why do they want me to know how to combine 4x and 5y? Why do they want me to memorize the rules of dividing monomials?

How will this help me grow as a person? Why, oh why, am I wasting my precious human life like this?

I am 16.

I should be walking through the forest, discovering Mother Nature’s mysteries.

I should be talking with my friends, learning to communicate with and console each other.

We kids should be playing, enjoying the beauty of life itself, learning to follow our instincts, and trust our intuition. We should be outside running, the dappled sunlight bathing our skin, absorbing the vitamins that we desperately need.

As I sit crying over my failed math sheet, I wonder why does it surprise us that we have such a screwed up society when all the adults leading us seem to be emotionally damaged in some way? How can they want us to be responsible future members of society when we are thrown onto the conveyor belt of society’s sweatshop as soon as we’re barely five years old?

What did they expect?

Sometimes, it feels like society is completely anti-human.

How in their right minds can they believe that we will build a better tomorrow when we’ve been taught from the moment we were old enough to read that “good” grades are all that matter. That we need to get them so we can be accepted into a “good” college or university that will brainwash us to believe that material wealth should be our top priority.

Buy this house and you’ll be happy! Buy this car and all your worries will be gone! Buy this perfume and everyone will like you!

Am I the only one who realizes that our capitalist society is the result of extremely emotionally unbalanced human beings?

Am I the only one?

We consume and consume, trying to obtain that perfect life that they dangle before our eyes, but what we usually don’t realize, until it’s too late, is that buying all that crap will never get us what we want. Unless we open our eyes and look inside, we will never shift from this pattern of consumerism—this horrendous cycle of “work, buy, consume, and die” that has been fooling us for years, making us believe that happiness is but millimeters away, and that all we need is one more thing.

One more car, one more house, one more shirt, one more. Just one more.

And only when we dare to peer inside ourselves and our surroundings will we be able to see the nasty environment that we’ve created. All the dying forests, the murdered creatures, the foggy skies—they are a reflection of what we are doing to ourselves.

Opening our eyes won’t be easy, because we’ve been unconscious for so long that some of us might have even forgotten that our eyelids have a function. The beginning will be so difficult that we may wish we’d never opened our eyes in the first place. But if we are wise, we will see that something must be done.

Because beneath all the muck that we have been building up within our souls, the ancient wisdom of the universe is still glowing faintly.

That happiness we’ve been searching for—that we’ve been trying to obtain by consuming—has been inside us all along. We have just been trained to ignore it, to ignore our intuition and our inner glow, and instead pretend that material wealth is the ultimate goal.

Seeing a tiny glimmer of that inner glow buried inside us will give us hope, will remind us that we are not alone, that the universe has been within us all along. We are the oneness of all creatures united; once we know that, the healing can begin. Once we manage to lift our heavy eyelids, our instincts and intuition will start coming back to us—whispers from our soul giving us the answers we have so long been searching for.

Our energy will begin to flow freely like it once did, long before society tricked us into damming it.